The Hard Charger at Obama’s Side Has His Hands Full

Denis McDonough, White House chief of staff, is the first aide President Obama sees in the morning and the last he sees at night.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

By PETER BAKER

November 27, 2013

WASHINGTON — Denis McDonough was pacing the path on the South Lawn of the White House one day this fall, ruminating on the challenges of a second term for his boss, President Obama. Mr. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, likes to stroll outside from time to time. It helps clear his head when he has a lot on his mind.

On this particular day, he was just hours away from a government shutdown that would test his president’s resolve and a day away from the debut of a new health care program that would test his president’s legacy. “I’m a keep-score guy; I always have been,” Mr. McDonough said in an interview as he circumnavigated the lawn. “So I’m good with the idea that there are scores being kept.”

The scores are now rolling in, and his team is down in the second half. Although the government shutdown proved a political victory as the White House stared down Republicans in Congress, the botched health care rollout erased the momentum and plunged Mr. Obama’s public standing to the lowest of his tenure. Last weekend’s six-month nuclear deal with Iran returned Mr. Obama to a position of leading rather than reacting, but it still drew fire from various directions.

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At the center of these challenges is Mr. McDonough, the ramrod-straight scorekeeper from Minnesota with the close-cropped, prematurely graying hair and the bearing of a military man, even though he never served. A fanatically fit, workaholic hard charger who sometimes left bruised feelings across the administration in Mr. Obama’s first term, Mr. McDonough, 43, has become a much-praised right-hand man in Mr. Obama’s troubled second term.

He is the first aide the president sees in the morning, the last he sees at night and the closest to him of the five men who have served as his chief of staff. Unlike his predecessors, Mr. McDonough came from the foreign policy arena, without the same experience in the domestic policy that dominates the White House. He now finds himself fixing the health care debacle he did not see coming, preparing for the next spending showdown with Congress and trying to rescue an imperiled presidency.

“Look, it’s a tough time for the presidency, and Denis is leading,” said Rahm Emanuel, one of his predecessors and now the mayor of Chicago, who spoke recently with Mr. McDonough. “Nobody can feel good when this is going on. My whole thing is don’t beat yourself up. The question is can you see a map and can you see the light forward.”

Tangled in Health Mess

Mr. McDonough’s failure to head off the health care problems surprised those who see him as a man of discipline and attention to detail. But current and former administration officials say that after 10 months on the job, one problem may have been that he stretched himself too thin and tried to do too much himself.

“Denis is playing the role of chief of staff, legislative director, chief strategist and head of the accountability and implementation office,” said a former colleague who asked for anonymity to speak more candidly. “One man can’t play all of the infield.”

In the months before the rollout, Mr. McDonough worked closely with Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, but did not see the warning signs clearly. He expressed confidence in the system only hours before the Oct. 1 kickoff. “There’s hundreds of people who worked all through last weekend as they have now through many, many weekends, to make sure that everything is in place, tested, firm, ready to roll,” he said as he walked the South Lawn.

In hindsight, of course, that confidence was misplaced. “It’s not that they took their eye off the ball — they spent a lot of time on it,” said John D. Podesta, who helped run Mr. Obama’s transition and remains close to the White House. “The question is whether they spent their time on the right things. It wasn’t centralized. You can decide that was Obama’s problem or Denis’s problem or Kathleen’s problem. But it was a problem.”

Mr. McDonough’s defenders say the real mistakes were made before he took over, when the White House put its policy officials rather than outside experts in charge of setting up the major web operation for the health care exchanges. Mr. Obama’s ill-founded promise that any Americans who liked their health plans could keep them likewise preceded Mr. McDonough’s tenure.

But Mr. McDonough was in the corner office when it all went awry. “It’s the age-old thing: Because you’re the chief of staff, you’re responsible for it,” said William M. Daley, another of Mr. McDonough’s predecessors. “Whether it’s legitimate or not, a lot of people would say it happened on your watch, so you’re responsible for it. At some point you’ve got to do a debrief on how did this thing really get screwed up — who was debriefing who, did we just not see this, how did we miss it?”

Colleagues say Mr. McDonough seems determined to figure out how his methodical structure broke down and what could have been done differently, but only after the problems are fixed. On the surface, at least, he exudes the calm of an aide who has been through a lifetime of crises over the past five years.

“When you see Denis, you don’t get the sense that his hair is on fire,” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic strategist who has advised the White House. But “he understands if they don’t fix it, it’s unacceptable.”

So far, virtually no one has called for Mr. McDonough’s head, and it is a measure of the credibility he has built up that he has not come under more fire. The political barbs from the outside — and the private recriminations from the inside — are aimed more at Ms. Sebelius. “He’s ready to hear bad news, so people never think he’s part of the problem,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

Mr. McDonough has also benefited by tending to Republicans and returning phone calls that once went unanswered. “I’ve been in Washington for 14 years, and I saw more of him in the eight weeks of budget and deficit discussions than I saw all the other presidents’ chiefs of staff combined,” said Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia. “And never had one give me his home number.”

Softening Rough Edges

A longtime congressional aide before joining Mr. Obama’s Senate office, Mr. McDonough was deputy national security adviser in the first term. He sometimes clashed with Pentagon officials, reproved reporters who wrote articles he did not like and had tense relations with the first two national security advisers, Gen. James L. Jones and Tom Donilon, according to colleagues.

“He’s a pugnacious guy,” said David Axelrod, the president’s longtime adviser. “But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing in a chief of staff. You kind of want that.”

Mr. Podesta said Mr. McDonough’s tough reputation suits the moment. “Denis is a warrior,” he said. “And it’s a war.”

Still, over time, friends said Mr. McDonough came to realize that being so aggressive was not accomplishing what he wanted, and by most accounts, he has mellowed. In the interview, he said he had learned from figures like former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. “Watching how they do their business was really informative and helpful to me,” he said. “So part of that keeping score is making sure I’m learning along the way, too.”

Mr. McDonough brings an advantage his predecessors did not have, an unrivaled relationship with the president born out of years of collaboration and now frequent walks together on the South Lawn. When big decisions are made, it is often only Mr. McDonough at Mr. Obama’s side, as when just the two of them returned from a 45-minute stroll in August to announce to stunned aides that Mr. Obama would suspend plans to strike Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack and ask Congress for permission instead.

Colleagues said they know that if they get instruction from Mr. McDonough, they are more inclined to believe it comes from Mr. Obama. “I don’t know that anybody at a staff level knows the president better than Denis McDonough,” said former Senator Tom Daschle, a mentor to Mr. Obama and a former boss of Mr. McDonough.

Mr. McDonough has made an impression by getting his own lunch from the White House mess, sprinkling the building with handwritten thank-you notes and doubling the size of his conference table so that more aides feel part of the process. His ferocious work habits — bicycling or running to work between 6 and 7 a.m. and staying until 9 p.m. — have exhausted those trying to keep up.

Mr. McDonough’s everywhere-at-once centrality in Mr. Obama’s second term underscores how much he has filled a void left by the departure of the president’s original inner circle: Mr. Axelrod, David Plouffe and Robert Gibbs.

Mr. McDonough, who played safety at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., has imposed his will on the White House through a series of maxims that sound like something out of a football team locker room, including “one team, one fight,” “nothing about you without you” and “measure twice before you cut.”

In other words, unity, inclusiveness and thoroughness. “I am a believer that bad policy gets made by laziness and lack of discipline,” Mr. McDonough said. He and the president made a list of priorities at the start of the year, and Mr. Obama is updated weekly on where they stand. Mr. McDonough, the scorekeeper, also insists on quarterly reviews of those goals, “and we’ll get to the end of the year and we’ll score ourselves against that” initial list.

Eager to Reach Out

One hallmark of Mr. McDonough’s tenure has been reaching out to disaffected quarters of Washington, including the cabinet and Congress, which both felt distant or even alienated from the White House. Representing a reserved president who does not care for glad-handing, Mr. McDonough has taken it upon himself to organize dinners and slog his way through a long call sheet every day that was once ignored.

“Every time I’ve called down there, he’s gotten back to me,” said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York.

And yet the schism with lawmakers is as deep as ever. “That’s frustrating,” McDonough conceded as he made his third lap around the track. “But do I think the outreach and everything was for naught? Absolutely not.”

Still, for the scorekeeper, it is hard to rack up points in a Congress that wants nothing to do with helping Mr. Obama. The president’s gun control legislation went nowhere, as have his ideas on infrastructure, jobs and early childhood education. Mr. McDonough still hopes the two sides can rewrite immigration laws, and he wants to make use of executive power to advance energy and environmental goals.

He faces another clash in the coming weeks as the spending-and-debt fight delayed by the government shutdown’s resolution comes to a head again, with the chances of a long-term agreement slim.

All of which raises the question: With the troubles of the fifth year and the sagging poll numbers, what score does the scorekeeper give himself so far?